


Feel Strength From These Hands

by hitlikehammers



Series: No End To This Thing [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 'Til the end of the line, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Returns, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Fix-It, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Credits Scene Fix-It, Feelings, Fix-It, M/M, Reunions, So Very Many Feelings and Tears and Other Such Emotive Things, Steve Rogers Feels, Supersoldiers in Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 10:57:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6751228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time Steve’s blood stops seeping from his body, the battle’s largely ebbed, at least for now.</p><p>By the time Steve’s blood stops pouring out of him, it’s bounding through his veins with the kind of blind-bold <i>hope</i> it hasn’t dared to touch in decades.</p><p>“<i>Bucky</i>?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <b>SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR.</b><br/><span class="small">Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6742027%20">Bear It No More</a>, because having healed Bucky, post-credits scene? We now need to heal Steve, as well.</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	Feel Strength From These Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to [Bear It No More](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6742027).
> 
> Title credit [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l_uDCNf0VE); love as always to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad) <3

Steve doesn’t want to say they’re doomed, or they’re outnumbered beyond springing back from; they’re still getting their sea-legs as a new, “compact”—Lang’s term—sort of fighting force, sure, but Steve doesn’t want to say they’re completely fucked.

That said: it’s gonna be a close one. That much, Steve will own to.

“Steve, behind you!” Clint calls out over the comms, and Steve spins, still unused to having nothing to deflect with and only dodging incoming just quick enough—he knows T’Challa would have given him a new shield, knows it almost beyond a doubt, but that little shred of almost was more than enough to hold him back, to seethe _unworthy, unworthy, unworthy_ to the point of drowning in it, and Steve saw that truth. Owned that truth. Let it shift the way he moved and breathed as half a person, again, without the heart in his chest to spur him: kept on ice so many miles away.

It’s a way of being, for now. Until Bucky comes back to him, or he fails to move quick enough, and the rest of him goes down in the dark.

He’s shaken from his hateful inner monologue, and reminded why he’s a selfish bastard when he hears the pained cry in his ear.

“Sam!”

“Hit, but not critical,” Sam reports quick; voice clear, even if there’s too much of a hiss in it. He’s still airborne, at any rate. “I’ll be alright.”

But it’s different, it becomes immediately and incontrovertibly _different_ when his team, when his friends, when the people willing to let go of _everything_ and follow _him_ start dropping, it hits too damn close to him, and fuck, just, just—

 _Fuck_.

They’re out of their depth, and Steve…

Steve doesn’t know what to do.

 _Unworthy, unworthy, unworthy_—

“Cap,” and suddenly it’s Sam in his ear again, a question and a wonder in his too-tight voice, Steve’s _fault_ ; “did you—”

“Steve,” Wanda rings in, clearer; “Where did you get the shield?”

“I,” Steve pauses to process, to try to comprehend that question: what it means and doesn’t mean, what it implies and what it’s actually asking because there is no shield, he doesn’t deserve the shield, he walked _away_ from the shield because what kind of protector leaves the man he loves to rot, to suffer, to freeze, what kind of _man_ does that?

No, he does not deserve a shield. He doesn’t deserve what it stands for, or the protection it provides.

“I don’t,” Steve starts, but then he glimpses it: more silver than his own was—raven black and lined in crimson: he doesn’t recognize it, but it takes his breath away as it arcs and takes out their enemies, ten, twelve, fifteen at a time as Steve gapes. 

“I—”

“Stay down, Stevie.” There’s a voice at his ear, a body easing him to the ground, and if Steve’s been walking around with a heart frozen still it thaws in one fell swoop with just that voice, with just that touch, with the promise of the impossible, with the scent as he inhales and his body just _knows_.

And it’s not as if Steve wasn’t painfully aware of all of the things he’d hidden from himself just to get up in the morning. It’s not as if Steve isn’t _horrifically_ aware of all the things he’s buried just to get through his goddamn day without drowning in the sea of his deathless, endless, wholly-deserved and dutifully inescapable mourning: he’s known he’d been hiding from the scattered pieces of his own heart for a very long time, and from more pieces, scratching and clawing on their way down once he’d seen that face behind that mask, once he’d known the full weight of the loss he thought he’d felt but hadn’t even skimmed the surface of—Steve knows he’s been hiding from himself a good long while, now.

But it hits him, in that moment: it hits him sudden and roiling and full, all of the things he’s set aside, all of the wanting and the aching and the guilt. It’s in the way hands settle on his body, skim across his frame head to toe: because in battle, in fighting the Winter Soldier, Steve had touched Bucky enough, been touched in kind, and there’d been no reason to dwell on how it didn’t feel right, how it didn’t catch up in his pulse like spun sugar, delicate; like the laying of your hands atop themselves awaiting communion, precious—there was no reason to lament that change, that loss.

But there is every reason, here, now—because it is that. It is all of that and more, here: Bucky’s hands against him from nowhere, _Bucky_ from nowhere: it’s heavy and light and loud and soft and now and then and all things in paradox inside the strange gallop of Steve’s heart when he meets eyes that know him, that look at him and see him entire, and give a shit: put him first, for no reason save that he’s Steve Rogers, and Bucky Barnes was always a fool and thought he was worth it.

“Look at this shit,” Bucky tuts, and Steve glances down, woozy—off-balance; Bucky’s hand is stuck with blood where Steve’s suit is torn, where he hadn’t realized he’d taken fire until just this moment, with Bucky’s touch on his wound promising healing, promising the bad guy’d go down and stay down and Steve would walk away, bruised, maybe, but into arms that held him up even if not as close as Steve always dreamt; into hands that patched him up and saw him through, even if they couldn’t see the heart Steve held in offering, in kind.

Bucky’s touching his left arm, opening hidden stores inside what’s clearly a new model: he bites off the cover on a syringe and expertly jabs it into Steve’s flesh; Steve wouldn’t know it, if he hadn’t been looking, it’s so quick and expertly done as to be painless.

“Buck?” And anyone else would say common sense would tell him to fear, or at least to question, what Bucky’s just hit him with, but that’s not what common sense says to Steve: common sense wants to know that Bucky is really here, and that the hurt in Steve’s chest isn’t really where the bullet hit him; that the falling apart that’s seizing every part of him isn’t the reality, and the vision in front of him, trimmed-hair hanging like halo against the sun, isn’t just the last-gasp of his weary soul before the close.

“Modified TXA,” Bucky says idly in answer to the question Steve hadn’t asked and didn’t need to, but that anyone-else’s common sense would have. “Coagulant, of sorts,” he tosses the empty syringe, focused now on Steve’s face, hands on Steve’s face, worried kind of smile teasing on those lips.

“Don’t like seeing that much red on you,” Bucky murmurs, and Steve nearly trembles for the way Bucky doesn’t seem to even notice his own thumbs drawing circles on the apples of Steve’s cheeks. “Hurts, seeing it, even knowing it’ll pass and you’ll be fine.”

And Steve can’t help but whimper, can’t help it because he can feel his heart coming apart all over again as he moves into Bucky’s touch, into his space, sits up just to be closer to him, to know that he’s real—

“Stay down.” Bucky’s voice is firm, and his hold slides to just an open palm on Steve’s chest, pushing him back down, and oh, but that touch just above the heart: so many nights curled around Steve’s failing body with a hand just there, and it’s like plucking the right note in a different octave: one that shakes Steve harder than it used to not for its newness, but because it was gone for so _long_ and he never stopped to let himself remember what it felt like to be a complete melody, what it felt like to have that kind of resonance that made you actually _feel_ the fact that you had a soul.

Steve hadn’t let himself think about it; but hell if he’d _forgotten_.

“Just for a second, punk,” Bucky’s talking to him, missing the world-shifting revelation occurring beneath his touch; “Let that at least stop spilling out, huh?” He nods to Steve’s side, where the bleeding’s already slowed to barely anything. 

“Wait for my signal,” Bucky grasps his shoulder and bores it into Steve with gravity in his gaze, knowing enough of Steve not to ask him to stay out, but to beg him without giving it words to just wait; just _wait_ —and Steve can do that. He’s had enough practice waiting for a thing he never thought could come to him; could come _back_. 

“You’re out-numbered and you’re off balance,” Bucky knows this, too: explain, rationalize beyond even Steve’s ability to shut him down. More proof that this is _Bucky_. “Too many people on the ground, not enough eyes up-top, even with Wilson’s fancy bird toy—”

Steve swallows. “It’s named—”

“‘Course he _named_ it,” Bucky snorts. “S’like calling your Johnson something special.” He shakes his head with a huff and a smirk. “It’s not Little Sammy, is it? Fuck, that’d be the cherry on top.”

“I—”

“Nevermind,” Bucky waves it off, refocusing on the moment. “Just,” and he looks at Steve, then: _really_ looks at him, and Steve feels piece of himself burn that he thought were dead; he feels halves in him that never thought to be whole again coming together between the clumsy tripping of his heart.

“I did _not_ intend to come out of nowhere like this, alright?” Bucky says, a little breathless, a little too earnest: _perfect_. “That was nowhere in the plan, but you have this absolutely fucking _impossible_ way of giving a guy a heart attack at every turn with your sheer fuckin’ _absence_ of self-preservation, so, just,” he glances down, lets his left hand settle with unspeakable tenderness against the slowly-closing wound in Steve’s skin. 

“Let this stop bleeding, and let me even this up in the meantime, okay?” 

Bucky moves to stand, and Steve feels something threaten to tear beneath his ribs, because no, no, Bucky can’t go, Steve _needs_ —

“Bucky, you can’t—”

“I can, though,” and Bucky’s smile is small, but honest; his tone isn’t resigned, but more soft, and knowing. Wise, almost. Steve thinks it’s a little bit beautiful. 

“It’s what I’m good at.”

Steve frowns. 

“What you’re good at?”

“Watching your back,” And Bucky leans to squeeze Steve’s shoulder in comfort, a reflex as his eyes wander elsewhere: and that warmth in the middle Steve’s chest, is what that is. “That, and keeping your stupid ass breathing.”

Bucky crouches and grabs for the shield Steve had seen before—his shield, that’s obvious Steve realizes now, belatedly, but Bucky holds it like it was made for him; like Steve always hoped to have held his own and never quite managed, this is a man _worthy_ of what he carries into battle, and Steve didn’t think his heart could handle stretching to hold any more than what Bucky’s already made him feel, but it does.

It absolutely does, at that sight; and then, at Bucky’s next words: soft and sweet and hiding nothing, baring himself heart and soul if only for an instant, if only for _Steve_ :

“S’what I fight for, after all.”

And Steve watches, unabashed, as Bucky spins on his toes and rises, delicately taking Steve’s com and fitting it to his own ear.

“Wilson,” he says with an authority, a comfort and ease that Steve’s maybe never seen in him before; “swing it around.” 

“He _ain’t_ called ‘Little Sammy’, asshole,” Sam’s voice is loud enough that Steve can pick it up as Bucky chuckles.

“The thing, whatever it’s called,” he iterates; “you, or it: swing _around_.”

And Steve watches as that’s exactly what Sam does, expertly dodging enemy fire. 

“Maximoff,” Bucky doesn’t even have to articulate what he wants before Wanda reads it—from his mind or his face, Steve won’t ever know—and nods.

“On it,” and she lifts herself into the air to take the high-ground. 

“Lang, can you go big again?”

“For a little while,” Scott’s voice sounds sure enough. “So long as I don’t have some spider-brat tying my legs.”

“Don’t think that’ll be a problem this time around,” Bucky smirks, and doesn’t wait to see Scott exceed human size. “Barton, you follow Maximoff and take your nest.”

“On it,” Clint’s already scaling greater heights, in his element.

“What about you?” Wanda’s voice breaks in; “You are the sniper, yes?”

Bucky’s mouth does something strange. Not a smile, not a frown: but not neutral.

“Not always,” is what he settles on saying; his eyes, though. Steve can still see his eyes before he leaps into combat in Steve’s stead, and those eyes.

Those eyes are soft. Unburdened, somehow.

They take Steve’s breath away.

“Not anymore.”

And Steve does what he’s told, for once: keeps a hand to the wound in his side to see when it stops bleeding entirely, to know it to the second, but he stay put until then and takes in what is one hell of a display of competence: he’s never had the opportunity to watch Bucky fight, never without ten thousand other things in his head, not without watching his motions just to see where to block in turn—but even so, even with that considered, Bucky’s doing something new, Bucky’s taking the War they both fought, and taking what Steve always did with the shield in hand, and stepping with the unforgiving, unquestionable purpose of the Winter Soldier but with none of his menace, all of a sniper’s focus, and his whole heart in it: unafraid.

He’s never done that before. And it shows, because where they’d been flagging, where things had been falling apart just moments before, the presence of one James Buchanan Barnes turns the tide in what seems like an instant: the world responding like Steve always has to the mere _fact_ of Bucky, standing up and saying no to the Reaper.

By the time Steve’s blood stops seeping from his body, the battle’s largely ebbed, at least for now.

By the time Steve’s blood stops pouring out of him, it’s bounding through his veins with the kind of blind-bold _hope_ it hasn’t dared to touch in decades.

And Bucky’s checking in with each member of Steve’s team as he jogs back to Steve’s position in the wings, nodding and looking at ease enough with the responses he gets not to cause concern, but hell: Steve doesn’t like admitting it, particularly, but it wouldn’t have mattered, those responses: _selfish, selfish, selfish_; not with _Bucky_ breathing heavy right in front of Steve, those stormcloud eyes wide, and only for him. 

“Steve—”

“Buck?” Steve asks, cuts him off because that voice is so smooth, so purely _Bucky_ , but changed still; refined through fire. “I, they said, T’Challa said,” and Steve can’t finish, can’t outpace the pump of his fearful heart that this isn’t real, because T’Challa had said they’d let Steve know as soon as Bucky was ready to come back, as soon as Bucky felt safe and it was okay—

But oh, then Bucky’s hands are on his face again, like they used to go to steady him with his lungs acted up, when he couldn’t breathe—never knowing that the contact made Steve breathless in wholly other ways on its own.

But they made it worth fighting for air through, because they were _Bucky’s_ , and hell if Steve didn’t want every minute, every second in this world at that man’s side. 

“Doesn’t matter,” Bucky’s saying, and Steve frowns, because it does, because Steve ached for the privilege to be at Bucky’s side when he was _free_ again, Steve _hurts_ at the idea that Bucky woke up alone, that he could have had any space, a single moment to wonder whether he was wanted, or missed, or needed, or thought of in every breath— 

“Doesn’t matter right _now_.” Bucky must read the dismay, the disagreement on Steve’s face. He leans down, and braces his hand on Steve’s shoulder once more. “You okay?”

“Me?” Steve damn near squeaks, for the concern and seriousness in Bucky’s eyes, for the way there’s no question that of _course_ he’d ask after Steve first, no matter what, and what that does to Steve, what that does inside his veins and under his ribs and, and—

“Fuck, Bucky, I’m—”

And Steve’s choking on whatever words he meant to say, whatever protest he means to give, whatever _What the hell, Buck, you’re asking me if I’m okay, I left you to loom in perpetual cold and here you are saving my ass and how is this real, how are you real, how can you ask—_

But whatever Steve means to say, or ask, or do, really just comes out in a single, pleading sob:

“ _Bucky_?”

“Yeah, Stevie,” and Bucky kneels down right next to him, draws him close without a second thought and murmurs hot against Steve’s head: “M’right here.”

“They, you’re, you,” and Steve tries breathing; can’t hack it. Tries stringing words into sentences; too much. 

“Me,” Bucky distills out of Steve’s incoherence; gets to the heart of him in more ways than one without a single fucking thought. “I’m _me_ again.”

And Steve’s bewildered, and overcome, and overwhelmed and full of feeling, and if this is real, if this is _real_ —

“ _Buck_ ,” he croaks, and Bucky wraps arms tighter around him and just holds him, cradles him close against his chest that rises and falls, and it’s a place Steve always used to feel safe, when the worst sickness would hit, when he was weakest, most vulnerable: and it’s ironic, that Steve doesn’t know if he’s felt safe at all since the last time he was pressed against this chest; since the last time he felt that heartbeat on his cheek like a fingerprint: unique and telling and so fucking _close_.

This is real. This has to be real, and Steve will break for it, he knows this, but if it’s _real_ —

He might actually have a shot of getting put back together, at the close.

“Gentlemen, we have incoming,” Sam’s voice comes across the com hanging now from Bucky’s ear, for both of them to hear. Bucky doesn’t move; that heartbeat doesn’t change, and Steve lets himself have another moment, another moment, another beat to call his own in secret: stolen, but held close inside his own chest, hoarded there, just in case.

Bucky lets him pull back first, on his own terms, and Steve didn’t think he knew how to be more grateful for the man in front of him until that very moment, until he meets Bucky’s eyes and sees _home_.

“You wanna split the difference on this thing?” Bucky lifts the shield at his side, and Steve just looks at him, and marvels at the way the world can change, and the things the universe can hold, and good _god_ , but Steve can feel his own heartbeat, just then, just now.

And Jesus: but it doesn’t fucking _hurt_.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com).


End file.
